Mississippi Gov. Echoes Trump’s Claims That Polls And Election Are ‘Rigged’

Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant (R) repeated Donald Trump’s claims that polls of the 2016 presidential election, as well as the election itself, were “rigged” in a Monday interview.

“That’s oversampling, it goes on, there’s no doubt that the media is encouraging this to occur,” Bryant told host Paul Gallo on statewide radio network Supertalk, as flagged by Right Wing Watch. “And they gleefully report those oversamplings that show Donald Trump behind.”

At a Monday campaign rally in St. Augustine, Florida, Trump had cited a hacked email published by WikiLeaks to suggest that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta had “rigged” polling to suppress GOP voter turnout.

“John Podesta rigged the polls by oversampling Democrats, a voter suppression technique,” Trump claimed.

In fact, “oversampling” involves surveying enough members of particular segments of a larger population in order to get a statistically significant result within those groups, but those numbers do not skew the results because they are later weighted to their proportional significance in the population as a whole. The stolen email exchange Trump cited also referenced internal campaign polling to inform media buys, not mainstream polling from news organizations.

In the interview, Bryant went on to claim that the election will also be “rigged,” and that “any Republican has to have an overwhelming majority of the vote” in order to win.

“Where the more liberal voting populations may be, in the cities and New York and California and some of the other areas, all you have to do is win those,” Bryant said. “You can forget about flyover country. That doesn’t seem fair to me at all.”

Gallo suggested that states which are under “liberal control” have “free will to do just about anything they want.”

“Keep the polls open as long as you want!” Bryant agreed.